“Mine were words—his were actions,” Donald Trump explained in the recent Presidential debate. “Mine,” of course, refers to what the Republican candidate was caught saying in a leaked video about grabbing female genitalia, among other nasty remarks. “His” are what Trump insists are Bill Clinton’s allegedly abusive actions toward women. “Locker-room talk,” Trump would like you to know, is just that—talk.
Let’s put aside the probability that Trump was likely describing his own past actions, a practical confession of his own incidents of sexual assault. I’d like to instead focus on the more general question: Do words matter less than actions?
To ask the question is to misunderstand the problem—because it assumes that we need to weigh one against the other. But we don’t. Nor should we. Words don’t matter more or less than actions because words themselves are actions.
Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”
Words have launched wars. They’ve inspired civil-rights movements. They are the laws we live by, and the ones we break. We say them to hurt, to comfort…you get it by now: What we say has consequences.
And so Trump’s litany of remarks denigrating women—and pretty much everyone—are deeds that we ought to take seriously. His hate speech is a type of action that can, and already has, spurred further hateful action.
Of course, some actions are worse than others, and obviously, saying that you get off on groping someone without consent is not as bad as actually doing it. But let’s be clear—at this point, we’re merely comparing levels of bad.
All of which means that the things we say to each other are manifestations of how we treat each other. And you know, I was tempted to delete that last line right after I typed it because I thought it was too obvious and just plain lame to write. Then I realized: This whole blog post seems pretty obvious.
After another minute, something else occurred to me: Sometimes, maybe often, probably too often, we overlook life’s most obvious aspects. This entire election seems like one of those times. Intentionally or not, many people are neglecting to see hateful rhetoric for what it is. They’re failing to look behind a curtain of entertainment to see that an ignorant, incompetent, dangerous person is running to lead a country.
They are also putting aside the truism that words matter.
